Tumblr for Business – Best Practices

Is there room on Tumblr for my business? Tumblr is a powerful tool for many businesses to showcase their products and gain traction with their followers.

This article is the final part of a six part series by Wishpond. This series will explore the business benefits of the social media platform, Tumblr, and how it can help your online marketing efforts.

Keep your content interesting

As with any official company blog (or any blog, really), keep your content high quality and interesting. It goes without saying that the more interesting your posts are, the more likely people will actually read and reblog it.

As you are exposed to all the different types of posts that your followers reblog, you can quickly gain an idea of the types of content your followers like to share. Make an effort to understand what your followers like seeing and try to produce material that will be approved by your community.

In particular, try to avoid creating “walls of text” that will cause readers to skip your post entirely; keep your messages short and insightful and add pictures (or even animated GIFs) to your posts to keep things fresh. If you want to write a longer blog post, remember to properly separate them into paragraphs so that people will actually read it.

Avoid parroting your Twitter and Facebook content to Tumblr. At the very least, rephrase or elaborate on any information you want to transfer over to Tumblr, especially if it is related to promotions.

Customer Engagement

As with many social media sites, Tumblr is an excellent channel for companies to communicate with their followers. To further facilitate this, Tumblr allows users to privately “ask” businesses (or any Tumblr user) questions about anything.

This can also be done anonymously, which may increase the number of people using this service. The business can then publicly answer the question for all the followers to see.

Of course, because of the option for users to ask anonymously, there will probably be a higher amount of criticism received. Many companies fear this, but in the social media realm, criticism can be beneficial. It allows your business to find and publically address issues with your company, your products, and your brand. Though it can be tricky, by cleanly, cleverly, and concisely resolving customer issues, the reputation of your business could potentially increase.

While the below example is not from a business, by giving a solid explanation to an ask, the connection between the community and the artist have increased the credibility of the artist .

Tumblr for Business Best Practices

It is important not to become so obsessed with your own products when it comes to Tumblr posts. Share interesting content that may be unrelated to your company just to give yourself a human feel. If your fans realize that your blog is more than a mouthpiece for your company, they may be more willing to build a relationship with your brand.

Tagging Properly

Like Twitter and Instagram, tagging is an important part of blog posts. For Tumblr, however, the tags for a post are specified at the bottom of every post. Remember to add these in!

Tumblr for Business Best Practices

Here are an example of tags for a blog post about Google+

While your followers will see what you post regardless, those who are not subscribed will not see your posts unless they manually search for one of your tags.

The Art of Reblogging

When reblogging someone else’s work, try to add something insightful to the text. Any new text or pictures that are added to the reblog will be seen by any of your followers (and if they reblog it, their followers as well). This is a good way to repost someone else’s work and make it relevant to your business, and can organically spread your brand name as well. Furthermore, reblogging a follower’s content shows that you value their opinion or creativity.

Tumblr for Business Best Practices
A post’s reblog history. Note that users are also adding their own information in when they reblog it.

Once you reblog something, the person you have reblogged it from (and the person they reblogged it from, and so on) can see any changes you have made to it. Thus, it is common courtesy not to delete or edit any of the text that others before you have written.

Another thing to keep in mind when reblogging content is that all the tags from the original post are erased and must be re-added. If no new tags are added, only your followers can see it, so always remember to put in your own tags!

Staying Active on Tumblr

One of the key features of Tumblr is its post scheduling and post queue system. Posts (and even reblogs) can be scheduled to be released at a certain time. For businesses, this can be useful for keeping an appearance of activity and making sure there is always new content on your followers’ dashboards.

Conversely, this feature can also be used to space out your posts so as to avoid flooding your followers with unwanted content. Tumblr also uses a simplified system for setting up scheduled posts. While you can just write down the time and date that you want your post to be published, “next Tuesday, 6 am” will also work.

Tumblr for Business Best Practices

If your business is multinational, this feature becomes especially useful. Focusing content relevant to partners in different time zones becomes much more targeted when you release your content at the right time.

If you don’t have any real particular preference, setting up a queue can help stagger out your posts throughout a day. As shown below, a number of posts will automatically go out throughout a set range of hours. This is most useful when used in conjunction with reblogging material, as it is usually not time-sensitive and is just used to add some activity to your blog.